Virginia Is For Losers

WASHINGTON — At the Democratic National Convention last year, in the course of covering the Democratic reaction to the national campaign by conservatives to suppress the vote so as to advantage the Republican party, I had the opportunity to talk to a lawyer from Richmond named Henry Marsh. A long time ago, Marsh won an important legal victory in the battles against phony, vote-suppressing "literacy tests."

He proved that a registrar of voters in Petersburg was using a literacy-test scam to keep African Americans from voting. In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was being debated, Virginia argued that it shouldn't be covered under Section V of that act, which required that, because of their proven history of discrimination, states so covered were required to submit any change in their election laws to the Department of Justice. The states-rights people howled. (They still do. It's Section V that Texas wants to use to bring down the whole act.) Virginia claimed it was being unfairly used. Henry Marsh got the material with which he'd won his case to Senator Edward Kennedy. Virginia got put under Section V. "I have to admit," Marsh said. "I am surprised at the intensity with which they're resisting, but I've been involved for a long time. I always expect to have to win this fight over and over again."

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This becomes important again because, yesterday, the state legislature in Virginia ran a scam to which Henry Marsh was remarkably central. Marsh, a state senator, was in Washington to celebrate the president's second inauguration. In his absence, the Republicans in the legislature rammed through a redistricting plan that would have embarrassed Elbridge Gerry.

With Marsh's absence, Senate Republicans in Richmond had one more vote than Senate Democrats and could push the measure through. The new redistricting map revises the districts created under the 2011 map and would take effect before the next state Senate elections in Virginia and would redraw district lines to maximize the number of safe GOP seats.

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Several things: first, the Republicans are not really prepared to change in any substantial way. Given the choice between adapting their policies to a changing nation and gaming the system so that they don't have to do so, they will pick the latter every time; second, the battle against this gaming of the system has to be national in scope. The great noise now about how redistricting the congressional districts enabled John Boehner to maintain control of his tiny gavel ignores the fact that gerrymandering in the states produces the legislatures that gerrymander the Congress; third, the people behind these schemes simply will not stop. They have to be stopped and last, that making it more difficult to vote is now as much of a litmus test for young Republican politicians and being anti-choice is.

Virginia governor, and lifetime transvaginalist, Bob McDonnell, who has national ambitions, is pretending to be outraged by all of this, and pretending that he's genuinely ambivalent about signing off on the whole deal. I would just point out that "I certainly don't think that's a good way to do business," isn't exactly an incendiary observation. (I might also be inclined here to make the Toby Ziegler bet on what McDonnell eventually will do — all the money in my pocket against all the money in yours.) I would also say that anyone who would use Henry Marsh's absence to roll back what Henry Marsh did for his country has to crane his neck to see how low he really is.